Is remote auditing impossible? What the Basic Auditing Series says

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Basic auditing · Reading the texts

I reread the eleven bulletins looking for a passage that makes the communication cycle impossible when auditor and pc are not in the same room. There isn’t one. What the text does contain is a set of precise requirements the link has to meet.

Reference: Basic Auditing Series 1R–11, HCO Bulletins of 23 May 1971

The question

The objection comes up often: auditing only works in person, because there has to be “something” between auditor and pc that a screen cannot carry. That is a claim about the tech, so it can be checked against the tech.

The Basic Auditing Series is the right place to look. It is eleven bulletins, reissued together on 23 May 1971, on a single subject: the communication cycle between auditor and pc, which the first bulletin calls “about the only thing that makes auditing work”. If physical presence were a condition, this is where it would be written. Below I cite them as BAS (Basic Auditing Series) followed by the number: BAS 4R is the fourth bulletin of the series, revised.

I read them looking for every sentence that mentions place, distance, sight, touch, gesture or instrument, and asked of each one: does this sentence stay true if the two people are in different cities?

Four passages that rule out impossibility

1. They are cause, distance, effect with the Auditor at cause and the Pc at effect, and cause, distance, effect with the Pc at cause and the Auditor at effect.

   BAS 4R, Communication Cycles Within the Auditing Cycle

   The cycle is defined as cause, distance, effect. Distance is a term of the formula, and the bulletin gives it neither a measure nor a limit. One metre and a thousand kilometres are both “distance”.

2. Even if it’s telepathy it’s cause, distance, effect. It doesn’t matter how that communication took place, you know whether he’s answered the command by a communication cycle. I don’t care how you sense this.

   BAS 4R

   The medium is declared irrelevant, provided the cycle completes. It is the plainest statement on the subject in the whole series.

3. Actually there is no backflow of any kind that hits the auditor […] It isn’t burning the mass, it is as-ising the mass and that’s why there is nothing hitting the auditor.

   BAS 1R, The Magic of the Communication Cycle

   The first bulletin describes auditor and pc as two poles, and the image could be read electrically: two poles close together, a current between them. The text rules that out at once. Nothing physical passes between the two bodies; the pc’s mass is as-ised, not transferred. A model in which nothing travels from one body to the other does not need the bodies to be near each other.

4. This cut communication line is not perceivable to the naked eye. It’s hidden because it’s from the Pc—a Thetan unseen by the Auditor—to the Pc’s bank—unseen by the Auditor.

   BAS 3, The Three Important Communication Lines

   Of the three lines in a session, the most important is the one from the pc to his bank. The bulletin says the auditor cannot see it with the naked eye even when the pc is sitting in front of him. The decisive part of the session does not depend on anything the two bodies have in common.

What the text actually requires

The absence of a prohibition does not mean any link will do. The bulletins ask the auditor to perceive a good many things, and each of them becomes a condition on the channel. The first is the hardest.

Where distance removes a possible error

Also, do not shove things at a pc or throw things to a pc. Don’t gesture toward a pc. It drives in anchor points and makes the pc reject the auditor.

BAS 6 forbids shoving or throwing things at the pc. These are the only passages in the series that presuppose a shared physical space, and they are prohibitions: at a distance those errors cannot be committed. Gesturing toward the pc, on the other hand, is still possible on video and still forbidden.

What this reading does not cover

• “Auditor presence”. BAS 2R lists auditor presence among the things that have to be perfect, but the series does not define it. If it is defined elsewhere as the presence of the body, the conclusion changes.
• The reality of the terminal. BAS 1R says the pc needs a second terminal because he considers himself mass, and BAS 2R says a communication line depends on reality, communication and affinity. Whether an auditor on a screen is a real enough terminal for a given pc is settled pc by pc, not from the texts.
• This is a reading, not a proof. I am saying the bulletins do not rule it out. Whether a remote session gets the same results as one in person is something only results can show.

In practice

Anyone who wants to run a remote session while staying inside these bulletins has a checklist already written:

• video always, never voice alone;
• a frame that takes in face, hands and cans;
• needle and tone arm visible to the auditor in real time;
• two-way simultaneous audio, with no cut-outs when voices overlap;
• delay low enough not to distort acknowledgements and steering: test it beforehand, not in session;
• remember that the pc’s gaze on video is misleading.

If one of these is missing, it is not distance that breaks the communication cycle. It is the channel failing to carry what the text asks the auditor to perceive.